Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Burnout Tastes Like Burning… Welcome Solstice & Goodbye 2011

8:15 PMI talk about this later in the post, but I wanted to let everyone know right at the top that this will, probably, be the last post until 2012. I am taking a break. It’s been a heck of a year, and I’ll be back, fresh and ready, after Winter Break!

This includes the Photo of the Day on Rubble. One sign of my burnout is that the Photo of the Day has become the photo of every now and then. Daily posts will return in 2012.

2:30 PMWinter Solstice today, thank the Gods! Now the days start getting longer. Happy day. It was also my birthday yesterday. These days, though, other anniversaries feel like bigger deals than just making another trip around the sun… It was a nice day, though.

The sun is out and The Big One and I are going to take the dog out for a long walk. Hopefully I can take some pictures and keep on getting to know the new camera I received for said birthday and for the upcoming holidays.

Yes. Burnout. I am very burned out. It has been a long year. The new year is not here yet, but I am a year older and the days are getting longer, so this seems as good of a time as any for a 2011 wrap up post.

This is the last task I am knocking down before stepping away from the computers for a couple weeks. No Photos of the Day (or of the every few days, as it has been going recently), no posts to any blogs, little to no activity anywhere else. Stick a fork in me, I am done. Break time.

For the next couple weeks it is about the kids, books, cameras, watching some movies and catching up with some Breaking Bad, Rescue Me, and some other badly neglected shows.

It is going to be some time to get some perspective, to get some rest, and to get ready for 2012. This past year was a strange one and not an easy one. 2012 looks to be very different. No less easy, but definitely more stable.

2011 was a year when my life was on hold. I started in California helping my mother with several issues, and ended in Gresham helping my children through several issues. Those tasks took up the whole year.

But that leaves me in a strange place where my plans for my life in 2012 look exactly like my plans for my life in 2011. This is not to say that I did not accomplish anything in 2011, far from it. The work with my family has been tremendously productive and rewarding. But in 2012, the main goal is to resume work on my own career and to start earning some damn money.

This also not to say that the work with my family is done, of course it is not. The boys have come a long way, but there is still a long way to go, a lot of healing left. Their wounds are no longer bleeding, but they are far from being back to normal. The Big One still has a long ways to go before he is back up to speed with school. The Little One, well, he has a long way to go before he’s back up to speed with life.

However, the progress they have made since April and May is amazing. Some solid foundations are now in place and they are both further along than I would have guessed they would be at this point. They are far enough along where I am feeling pretty good about heading back to work.

There will be challenges, of course, with this transition, but I think they are part of the growing process now, challenges encouraging growth, not obstacles hindering it.

I’ve been putting a lot of work in on the RubbleSites for the last couple months, a lot of posts, but even more time spent behind the scenes getting this and that set up. I feel, for the most part, this work is coming to a close and that, after a few small projects that will be completed after winter break when the boys are back in school, that I am at a point where I can pretty much just focus on content creation.

And that is a good thing, because once I am back to work, there is going to be little time for anything else. Posts may get shorter, and fewer and further between… I think my goal at that point will be one decent post for each blog per week, with some other, smaller “feature” type stuff thrown in here and there too.

Of course, I’ll be keeping up with my photo of the day and throwing music I like up on Retrovirus Lab, too.

So, the plan is, after the break, to take two weeks to finish the construction of these sites and to put a new portfolio together. Then my full time work and only major project will be landing a new writing contract.

One of the things that has been a little rough the last month or so is that I’ve fallen into a strange schedule with life. Since most of the uninterrupted work time I have these days is at night, after everyone is in bed, I’ve become rather nocturnal these days. I get a few chores done during the day, then the afternoon and evening has been spent working with The Big One and his homework, cooking dinner, usually more work with The Big One and his the homework (let’s face it, it has been more homeschooling than helping with homework), then getting everyone to bed.

Only then have I found the time to get the serious work done on the bigger projects I’ve been working on, like the One Day on Earth video, the Occupation photos and videos, etc. Since The Ex One gets up early, she’s been handling the mornings, getting the boys out the door to school. Through the end of November and up until the last few days, I’ve been going to bed about the same time she’s been getting up to get her and the boys’ day started.

This schedule actually worked pretty well for that period, for the most part. The Ex One was fresh for the mornings, and I was fresh for the afternoon and evenings, and the boys were spared dealing with a tired and grumpy parent!

Now that the boys are home, though, this schedule is terrible! Today we hardly got anything done. I have a few chores I need to complete before I start my break, the day is almost done and I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything. Of course, on the old schedule, my real work wouldn’t have even started yet, but I am done with the nocturnal thing.

Once I start the job hunt, I will need to be on a normal schedule. Since it would be murder on me to swing back and forth between day and night schedules every two weeks for the next month or so, I am not. I am just going to switch to a days only schedule and keep it there.

After break, my days will be compressed into what I can get done while the boys are in school. That means I will probably be a lot less productive, but there are no big projects, just a few small ones and wrapping up some big ones, so that should be fine. The challenge will be not getting sucked into any new big projects.

So, for the rest of break, I am taking some time for me. I might get caught up editing a few pictures here and there, but that is pretty much it. I have a small project, also, that I need to complete for my mother’s Christmas gift, but that is a small project. I might also finish the One Day video, but probably not until the boys are back in school.

That is the project, the One Day On Earth video, that was really burning me out, and it is still not done. I put a lot of time into that video and, at this point, I am not crazy about the results. With the limitations of the camera I shot the video well, there’s not much more I can really do with it.

I took a break from the video for the last 10 days or so, once the deadline was extended for a month, to get some distance from it and to make some decisions about it.

Pretty much, I needed to decide if it was something that I wanted to put another 40 to 80 hours in to or was it something I wanted to just wrap up and move on from. The break was good. It is time to put a few final touches on it and to move on. I was thinking about recording new music for it, nope. I was thinking about re-cutting the whole thing in Lightworks, nope.

I do need to put a couple more hours into it, but that is all. Upload it and move on. But it took several days of distance from it to realize that this was the best thing to do here.

The other big project I still need to finish is editing and posting all the Occupy Portland material. Of course, that stuff was sort of time sensitive, so the longer I go without posting it, the less relevant it becomes, the less of a priority... Still, I do want to get it up while it is still something of a current event and before it becomes history. But at this point, January is fine.

And that is about it. All that stuff, in a nutshell, was 2011. And since I am putting everything not done at this point off until 2012, that means my year is done. And I am tired. It is time for a long break and a lot of rest.